Influence Of Psychological Characteristics And Time Pressure On Human Performance On Digital Interfaces

In complex safety-critical systems such as nuclear power plant, humanreliability is of great importance to system safety. Personal characteristics,human-system interfaces, task complexity, time pressure, and various situationalfactors can influence human reliability. With the application of digital systems,questions have arisen: what psychological characteristics are more helpful forinteracting with digital interfaces? Do their influences vary with task conditions?Will an interface style preferred by operators with special cognitive styles? Willtraining change the preference? All these questions are worth for study since theyare related to system safety.Three psychological factors were considered in the study: Personality,cognitive style and personal interface preference. The focus was the influence ofpsychological characteristics on operation time, error rate, situation awareness, andsubjective task workload under different levels of time pressure. The experimentwas conducted with traditional and ecological interfaces to test the influence ofpsychological characteristics as well as possible interaction effect of cognitive style,interface design and time pressure. The influence of training and cognitive style oninterface preference was also examined.The results indicated significant main effects of cognitive style and personalityon some dimensions of performance, and significant interaction effects of timepressure and some cognitive styles. Operation time was related with forthrightness.Error rate was related with social boldness. Rule-consciousness affected situationawareness. Subjective workload was related with perfectionism.Impulsivity-reflectivity had significant main effect on subjective workload andinteraction effect with time pressure on operation time. Marginally significantinteraction effect of wholist-analytic cognitive style and time pressure on operationtime was found. Verbal-imagery cognitive style had main effects on situationawareness and subjective workload. Holist-serialist cognitive style had main effect on situation awareness. The results also indicated significant effect of training.Training can significantly change interface style preference. After training, subjectstended to prefer ecological interface. Main effect of holist-serialist cognitive style oninterface style preference was also found. Before training, holist subjects tended toprefer traditional interface and serialist subjects tended to prefer ecological interface.Significant interaction effect of training and verbal-imagery cognitive style oninterface style preference also existed. Verbal subjects didn’t change significantlyafter training, both preferring ecological interface. Bimodal and imagery subjectschanged significantly after training. They liked traditional interface before training.However they tended to prefer ecological interface after training.